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Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Notwithstanding all the lamentation
about how hard it is to find a great guy or girl, it’s really remarkable that a
fair number of us find our “The One” that we fall in love with and end up
spending a significant portion of our lives with. The odds are kind of stacked
against us, yet the newspaper is filled with daily announcements of weddings
and engagements.1

It’s kind of miraculous this happens—guy
meets girl, girl meets guy, happiness ensues. When you think about it, what are
the chances of one stumbling on the guy/girl of one’s dreams given the
enormousness of the world and the number of people in it?

The numbers are disheartening to even
the most hopeless romantic. There are roughly 7 billion people in the world. Approximately
70% of them are adults2, and there’s basically a 50/50 split between
males and females.3 That means there are about 2.45 billion potential “The
One”s out there for you.4

Of course, you have better odds than
that because you’re meeting more than just one guy or girl. But still, all
these potential partners are spread out all over the world. You’re basically limited
to the people in your immediate area, which seems awfully constricting. Logically,
your best shot is to live in a well-populated place with a high population
density, ensuring that you meet as many people as possible. A place like
Mumbai, for instance. It has a population of 14.3 million and a super-high
population density. That’s about 5 million (adult) guys/girls and you could
conceivably meet them all. If you did, that
would be about 0.2 percent of all the guys/girls in the world, or about 1/500th
of the total number. One in 500…doesn’t sound like such bad odds. Of course, as
we all know, not all guys/girls are equally desirable. You’d have a hard time
in Mumbai if an affinity for Indian food was a deal-breaker for you.

But there’s something even more
important than physical proximity when finding “The One”: Temporal proximity. We
all innately know that timing is everything, especially in a relationship. For a
spark to happen between two people, they have to be at exact points in their respective
lives or that spark won’t happen. It’s a hoary concept that’s totally true,
which is why we keep seeing movies that dramatize this idea, like Sliding Doors, The Lakehouse, and Déjà vu.6

What’s a little discomfiting is
thinking about two people who were made for each other being seriously
out-of-whack timing-wise. Like what if the person with whom you would click
most has already lived his or her whole life and died? It’s one thing to
narrowly miss running into someone at the deli, it is something else entirely
to never see them just because they happened to have been born decades before
you.

According to estimates, there have been
roughly 107 billion human beings who have ever lived. Minus the 7 billion on
the planet currently, that’s roughly 50 billion potential girl-/boyfriends7
that you never got the chance to meet, just because you guys didn’t happen to
be born around the same time. Which sucks. Your “The One” could’ve died in the
black plague, or been eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. Or they could’ve been
Marlon Brando, or Joan of Arc, like that song. Which still sucks, but at least
you have pictures of them.8

The real migraine-inducer is thinking
of the possibility that you’re “The One” for someone in the future who hasn’t
been born yet. Tough to crunch the numbers on this scenario since we don’t know
when that ELE is going to hit, but suffice it to say that there’s a whole other
big pool of people that we’ll never meet.

And yet, despite the long odds, most of
us have found the one we couldn’t imagine life without. So I’d just like to
suggest that the next time they ask you what you like best about them, just cut
to the chase and say that you’re glad they didn’t live during a time when
everyone thought the world was flat or a time when we didn’t have electricity
or even a time when we have flying cars and personal robots to walk our dogs. Tell
them, Yes, they are everything we could ever want. They have smiles that light
up our days, and gazes that melt our insides. They are wonderful, beautiful,
generous, intelligent, funny, amazing. But, most importantly, they are here,
with you now, and you couldn’t be any more grateful.

4- If you’re bi- then I guess the
numbers double, but not really because not everyone you’d potentially like of
the same sex would be gay. And then of course some of those 2.45 billion are gay so that eliminates them from the
pool if you’re heterosexual…look, a couple areas of this get into some fuzzy
math and I’m just trying to make an amusing little blog post here—oversimplified,
yes, but amusing enough—so stop being a stickler on the math and just go with
it.

Friday, May 25, 2012

This blog isn't normally in the business of breaking stories, but since it appears nobody else is talking about this yet (specifically Cigarettes and Red Vines, the most comprehensive site on PT Anderson), I'll share what I've discovered here.

On Thursday, the National Film Preservation Foundation released a remastered video of a John Huston documentary called Let There Be Light about soldiers suffering from psychological wounds suffered in WWII. I read about it in the paper today and the frame they used instantly caught my eye:

This seems to tell us very specifically where Joaquin Phoenix's﻿ character is in the teaser and who the person is across from him, or at least his profession. Furthermore, one of the psychiatrists in the Huston documentary asks a soldier "Are you mixed up?" (at about the 12:00 mark), which is the first line we hear in the teaser.

Moonrise Kingdom
opens today. Or rather, it opens in New York and Los Angeles today. The rest of
us will have to wait a few weeks, or maybe even months for the blu-ray release.
(When will they do away with the antiquated slow roll-out? When the ice caps
melt?)

The reviews have been pretty good so
far, and critics are saying it’s Wes Anderson’s best movie since Rushmore (which is probably my favorite movie
of his). So I’m pretty excited to see it, the first movie in a string of
promising releases lined up for the rest of the year. Here are my most
anticipated:

1. The
Master

Paul Thomas Anderson is probably my
favorite living director these days. Considering he doesn’t make a ton of
movies, a new one by him is a genuine event. His last movie was a jaw-dropping
artistic leap forward for him, so I’m curious to see if he can plateau-hop
again.

2. Django
Unchained

A new Quentin Tarantino movie is always
a cause for celebration. QT has intimated that he might retire soon so we’ve
got to enjoy his unique and important vision while it lasts.

The trailer is ruffling the feathers of
some who claim this looks like a desecration of the source material. Those
people must be totally unfamiliar with Baz Luhrmann’s work. His vision is
intentionally theatrical, bombastic, and over-the-top. His version of Gatsby might not be the book, but it
might be a really good movie.

5. Brave

I’ll always want to see the latest Pixar creation.
They’ve all been good, even the unfairly criticized Cars 2. Hopefully this new original story will rank right up there
with Pixar’s best and continue a dominance in the field of animation that is
stretching into its third decade.

About Me

So I'm officially an author. My book is called Deadly Reflections, and is available on the Kindle Store right this second. I encourage anyone who likes a good love story with paranormal aspects to check it out!